Because I'd been thinking of laying the files out in the same way for development as for deployment and I couldn't see how msg.pl accesses renderer.pm. I guess the answer is to move things around for development then reorganise them for deployment. Is this usual practise?

I presume the same problem arises with tests placed in /t - they have to be developed in a different context or they can't find the module they are testing because it's in a parallel universe.

I wouldn't move things around, rather I'd set things up so that perl checks your top level 'lib' for the modules. i.e. Put it into your @INC path.

Doing this in the script itself would be icky, so your best bet would probably to set your PERL5LIB (or PERLLIB) environment var to include this path.

A variant approach, which is handy if you commonly develop various modules, is to have a generic lib dir specific to you and (if you are on a Unix variant) symlink the modules you develop into there.

I use this approach with C/C++ and perl development. I have a $HOME/dev directory with include, lib and libperl subdirs.

My login then always adds $HOME/dev/include to $INCLUDE, $HOME/dev/lib to $LIB and $HOME/dev/libperl to $PERL5LIB.

If I'm working on module Foo I can just ln -s $HOME/dev/Foo/lib/* $HOME/dev/libperl to get things to work (similarly with .h/.so files for C/C++).

You need to re-run that link command whenever you add a new Foo::X (but not a Foo::X::Y).

isn't FindBin supposed to solve this parallel universe problem?

That looks like a sensible suggestion apart from the following injunction from the "known issues" section of the FindBin documentation:

Which also means that you should avoid using FindBin in modules that you plan to put on CPAN.

However, given that the issue is with a script rather than a module it seems reasonable that that advice does not apply.

---

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

Hi,

I usually put my scripts in a tools/ (silly of me, this seems like it's not that standard ;) directory then declare it in ad'hoc key of Makefile.PL:


    EXE_FILES => [ map { "scripts/${_}.pl" } qw(
        foo
        bar
        baz
    ) ],
[download]

All these files will eventually be installed in $PREFIX/bin directory.

About tools to ./lib link, I did not find any other way than cheating. For example foo would have a shebang like:


  #!/usr/local/bin/perl -IPerlMonks/lib
[download]

This actually works during test and does not impact deployed application.

Last, about t/*.t stuff, 'make test' automagically inserts blib-related directives but you will definitely have to use 'prove' like:


  % prove --lib PerlMonks/lib
[download]

HTH.

Cheers,

Xavier